WhatsApp bug allows anyone to access your group chats

There is a flaw in WhatsApp’s group chat security that lets anyone to add themselves in any group chat and get access to the messages, according to a new report.

The glitch was pointed out in a research paper by Paul Rösler, Christian Mainka and Jörg Schwenk at Ruhr-Universität. They stated that practically anyone can add themselves in any of the group chats and read all the to and fro messages being sent out.

WhatsApp group chat works in a simple way where one person, the administrator, creates the group and is in power of adding or removing anyone, deleting the group and setting its policy. However, the problem comes in when the end-of-end encryption that the app uses for sending messages are not ‘end-to-end encrypted’. Usual encryption is being used in these messages than can be easily cracked letting anyone to take control over the WhatsApp server. As per researchers, the attacker than also block any messages in the group, reported Tech Juice.

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However, the good news is that the likelihood of anyone getting unauthorized access to the app’s server is quite low. It can be something to worry about when government agency or a third party acquires the group chat yet, it is still not anonymous. When someone accesses the chat, all the members of the group are notified of the addition.

According to Wired, WhatsApp spokesman verified the report but said that the risk is quite limited since no one can secretly join a WhatsApp group chat as users can always chat one-to-one to confirm any uncertainties about unknown members appearing in their groups.

“We’ve looked at this issue carefully. Existing members are notified when new people are added to a WhatsApp group. We built WhatsApp so group messages cannot be sent to a hidden user. The privacy and security of our users is incredibly important to WhatsApp. It’s why we collect very little information and all messages sent on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted,” said the spokesperson.